It has been argued that "paternalistically motivated forced savings constitutes an important, and to some the most important, rationale for social security retirement systems." This paper revisits the role played by myopia in generating a theoretical rationale for pay-as-you-go social security...

O'Connell and Zeldes (1993) have shown that the dynamic inefficiency result of a standard gift model is reversed if parents can undersave strategically. I impose an explicit non-negativity constraint on gifts, which - for all numerical examples suggested by O'Connell and Zeldes - alters this...

In a world of endogenous fertility, where the number of descendants is an integral part of the economic allocation, the traditional concept of Pareto-optimality cannot be applied any longer: the number of individuals to be present on earth may vary between any two allocations we wish to compare....